316 THE CHINA STUDYWe won't be hearing about exciting research on dietary patterns, nor
will there be serious efforts to tell the public how diet affects health.
Instead, the prevention and nutrition budgets will be designated for
developing drugs and nutrient supplements. A few years ago, the direc-
tor of the NC!, the oldest of the NIH institutes, described prevention
as "efforts to directly prevent and/or inhibit malignant transformation,
to identify, characterize and manipulate factors that might be effective
in achieving that inhibition and attempts to promote preventative mea-
sures."18 This so-called prevention is all about manipulation ofisolated
chemicals. "Identifying, characterizing and manipulating factors" is a
not-so-secret code for drug discovery.
Considered from another perspective, the NCI (of the NIH), in 1999 ,
had a budget of $2.93 billion. 19 In a "major" 5-A-Day dietary program, it
was spending $500,000 to $1 million to educate the public to consume
five or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day. 18 This is only three
hundredths of one percent (0 .0256%) of its budget. That's $2.56 for every
$1O,000! If it calls this a major campaign, I pity its minor campaigns.
The NCI also has been funding a couple of multi-year large studies,
including the Nurses' Health Study at Harvard (discussed in chapter
twelve) and the Women's Health Initiative, mostly devoted to the testing
of hormone replacement therapy, vitamin D and calcium supplementa-
tion, and the effect of a moderately low-fat diet on prevention of breast
and colon cancer. These rare nutrition-related studies unfortunately
suffer from the same experimental flaws described in chapter fourteen.
Almost always, these studies are designed to tinker with one nutrient at
a time, among an experimental population that uniformly consumes a
high-risk, animal-based diet. These studies have a very high probability
of creating some very expensive confusion that we hardly need.
If very few of our tax dollars are used to fund nutrition research, what
do they fund? Almost all of the billions of dollars of taxpayer money
expended by the NIH each year funds projects to develop drugs, supple-
ments and mechanical devices. In essence, the vast bulk of biomedical
research funded by you and me is basic research to discover products
that the pharmaceutical industry can develop and market. In 2000, Dr.
Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine,
summarized it well when she wrote2°:
... the pharmaceutical industry enjoys extraordinary government
protections and subsidies. Much of the early basic research that